"A vertebrated, mammiferous marine animal."
"Well; go on; English all that."
"Well, whales, dolphins narwhals, and porpoises are the principal cetaceans. They are not fish, but marine animals, and they suckle their young."
"Well, that's news to me," said Charley.
"Now, then," said Jack, "if you two have finished your little side discussion, suppose we come back to the subject in hand. What do you know, Ned, about this fish that I have in my hand, and why don't you call him a shark's pilot now, as you say you did a year ago?"
"Why, because the books treat me the same way in his case that they do in the whiting's. They describe a shark's pilot which is as different from this as a whale is from a heifer calf, and so I don't know what to call this fellow. Did he make a fight when you caught him?"
"Indeed he did. I was sure I had a twenty-pound something or other on my hook, and when I pulled up this insignificant little creature, with the match box on his head, I was disgusted. I looked at him to see if he hadn't a steam-engine somewhere about him, because he pulled so hard, and that's what made me observe his match box and his curious up-side-down-itiveness."
"I say, Ned," said Charley, "why is it that our Southern fishes are so neglected in the books?"
"Well, I've asked myself that question, and the only answer I can think of is this: in the first place, there is no great commercial interest in fishing here as there is at the North; and then the natural history books and the cyclopædias are all written at the North or in Europe, and so there are thousands of curious fish down here which are not mentioned. There's the pin-cushion fish, for example. I can't find a trace of that curious creature in any of the books."
"What sort of thing is a pin-cushion fish?" asked Jack.